Questions asked before you hand over the keys

Because the alternative serves us rather than you. Without a price, you have to spend a call and often a visit establishing whether you can afford to ask, and when the number finally arrives you have nothing to compare it against. Every car is different, but the labor rate is not, the flat-rate times are not and the interval services are not. Those cover most of what anybody wants to know before they telephone.

Labor is charged at a published book time for the operation on your vehicle, multiplied by the labor rate. If an operation books at 2.4 hours you are charged 2.4 hours, whether the technician takes two or four. It cuts both ways: you are protected from a slow day, and we are not penalised for a fast one. It is the industry-standard method, and plenty of customers have never had it explained and reasonably assume they are paying for elapsed time.

Because the same operation on a compact car and on a three-row SUV involves different parts, different access and a different book time. A narrow figure would be a more precise lie. Your number comes from a written estimate against your car, and the ranges exist so you can tell whether that number is in a sensible neighbourhood.

It can, and when it does, work stops and you get a second call. A seized fastener that breaks, a second worn component only visible once the first is off — that is normal in this trade. What is not normal, and does not happen here, is finding out on the invoice. A revised estimate is authorized separately. See estimate and authorization.

No. There is no charge for the estimate, and no charge for reassembling anything we opened in order to diagnose. If you decline the repair you pay the diagnostic fee, take the written finding and the car, and owe nothing further.

Parts and labor, with the term stated on your repair order in months and miles, whichever comes first. Parts-only warranties leave you paying to have it fitted again, which is most of the cost. The term varies with the parts grade, and the exact figure for your repair is on the estimate before you authorize it — ask if it is not clear.

Four grades: OE, OE-equivalent, aftermarket and remanufactured. They can differ by a factor of three in price with warranties that differ just as much, and that is the single largest reason two estimates for the same job do not match. Our estimates always name the grade. The parts page goes through what each one actually means and when we recommend it.

For some jobs, yes — filters and wiper blades, no problem. For brakes, ignition, cooling and anything safety-critical, usually not, and the reason is warranty rather than markup. If a part you sourced fails, you pay the labor twice and we both spend a morning establishing whose problem it is. Where we do fit a customer-supplied part, the repair order says so and states that the part carries no warranty from us.

Yes, and in Florida that is your right — but ask at write-up, before the work starts. Once a part has gone into the core return or the waste stream it cannot be retrieved. Some parts genuinely cannot come back to you: anything on a core charge, anything a warranty administrator requires, and regulated waste like used fluids. We will tell you which and why. Asking is a reasonable thing to do and no shop should be uncomfortable about it.

Because you cannot verify any of them from a web page, and this industry has a serious problem with badges that mean less than they appear to. A page covered in stars tells you what a shop was willing to display, not how it behaves when your repair order needs to grow by four hundred dollars on a Thursday. What is published instead is checkable: a name, an address, a number, posted hours, a labor rate, a price menu and a stated process.

The honest options are stock imagery of somebody else’s workshop or staged photographs of ours, and neither tells you anything. The readouts on this site are the real content, and they carry the information a photograph would be standing in for.

Because there is no email address to publish yet, and a form that delivers nowhere is worse than no form. Rather than print an address that bounces, the site publishes the telephone number, which is answered by somebody at the counter. When an address exists it will appear here and the form will come with it.

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